Recorded 16–17 September 1982
From Radio Canada International disc no. E-1296, transcribed by Mary Ellen Kappler. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. This was an interview conducted by Cliff Arnold, which formed the main part of a program with contributions by Margaret Atwood, Don Harron, Eli Mandel, Robin Matthew, and Vincent Tovell. It was produced by Cliff Arnold and broadcast on Radio Canada International as “Back to the Garden: A Profile of Canadian Author and Critic Northrop Frye” in September 1983. The program is in two parts, and may have been originally broadcast as two half-hour segments.
[The program begins with a brief overview of Frye’s career and a comment by Margaret Atwood. It continues:]
ARNOLD: But let’s start with him telling his own story, which begins when he arrives at Victoria College.
FRYE: I came to Victoria College in the fall of 1929, and Toronto, while it was still a small town by world standards, was still a lot bigger than anything I’d seen before. The movement to the city of Toronto in itself was quite an education, and then of course the whole undergraduate career was one that provided me with a sense of social function. I’d always been a bit isolated as a high-school student, and at college there were a number of things I could go into, like dramatics and debates and the college magazine, that kind of thing.
ARNOLD: 1929 changed the lives of many people, as Frye recalls.
FRYE: I came in in the fall of ’29, the big stock market crash was in October, and within another year most of the students had become, relatively speaking, radicalized. My own political outlook was a thoroughly middle-class one. It has always been that. I regard the bourgeois as the finest fruit of humanity so far, and have always been middle-class in my loyalties and affiliations. But there was a good deal of what you might call social democratic feeling among the students: there was the League for Social Reconstruction, and of course the CCF party got organized within a year or two after my graduation. Gradually—well, not so gradually either, within a year or two—there were a couple of Communist groups, one Stalinist and one Trotskyist. But I had only rather indirect contact with those.
ARNOLD: Northrop Frye was never a Communist, but Communism did have its appeal for many other University of Toronto students.
FRYE: Among my classmates there was Herb Norman, who was a victim of the McCarthy witchhunts, and committed suicide in Cairo.1 Earl Birney was not a student then, he was a graduate, and became an instructor of English shortly afterwards, but he was interested in the Trotskyist group. His novel Down the Long Table gives a very good account of those days.
ARNOLD: In 1936 Frye had completed his undergraduate work at Victoria College, and had studied theology. In that very troubled year he went to Oxford. Was it to be the kind of intellectual Mecca that he had imagined?
FRYE: When I went to Oxford it was still the same world, but Nazism was of course very much stronger, and there seemed to be a rather nauseating amount of intellectual fascism in England at the time. It was the years between the Munich pact and the actual outbreak of war that I was in Oxford, and England seemed to me totally demoralized. At Oxford itself I found myself politically much more isolated than I had been. I thought that anybody who thought that that was the way out for England in 1938 and ’39 was embarking on an utterly suicidal course. I found very little intellectual stimulation at Oxford. The lecturers all seemed to regard it as beneath their dignity to be good lecturers, and they expected their students, or most of them, to do what I did: that is, go to the first lecture to get a look at the man, and then quit. The only really stimulating figure was C.S. Lewis, who was still at Oxford at that time.
ARNOLD: He returned to teach at his alma mater, Victoria College, in 1939.
FRYE: Having had three years of theology before that, I simply read the undergraduate school at Oxford, so that I have no graduate degree now. Oxford, of course, was still primarily interested in the undergraduate course—it was really all they knew how to teach—and at that time there was enough Anglophile feeling in the humanities at the University of Toronto for a person without a Ph.D. still to be able to make his way.
[Arnold explains that Frye has spent most of his career teaching English at the University of Toronto. Don Harron praises Frye’s teaching.]
ARNOLD: It’s always hard to say what makes a great teacher, but Frye feels the lecture is the most important part of teaching.
FRYE: I enjoy teaching undergraduates, because I feel that that’s where the centre of action is in liberal education. Graduate teaching is professional teaching—it’s something I’ve never quite got accustomed to. I can only get accustomed to it by treating graduate students as though they were undergraduates. I suppose many people would say that that indicates that I am not a scholar, and I wouldn’t quarrel with that statement—it depends on your definition of scholarship. But I feel that there’s no question about my function as a teacher with an undergraduate class. There’s a great deal of mystique about the seminar, and a sort of hazy notion that the smaller the class the better the teaching, and there’s also a great admiration for the tutorial system as they had it in Oxford and Cambridge. That admiration comes mostly from the people who have not gone through it. There are certain things that a lecture can do that a seminar cannot do; that is, it can present a broad historical sweep. I think in many respects that teaching should be an alternation of an informal teaching lecture with a somewhat smaller group. I don’t feel that a seminar should become too small, unless the students are very unusually good, because if it does, then the amount of the seminar that’s simply a pooling of ignorance becomes extremely obvious.
ARNOLD: Frye stresses a traditional English literature curriculum, with its background in the Bible and Greek mythology, and he has weathered years of teaching trends.
FRYE: We will probably always have anti-intellectual vogues among educators to contend with. Articles will appear telling people that the less education they have the better, and that what they really need to know is the social mythology of their time—which of course is an advertising and propaganda mythology; it’s a phony, fake mythology. You will have educators insisting that this is the one essential thing to teach, then they will go out of style, or something will happen like Sputnik in 1957, and there will be a reaction the other way. The wise teacher realizes that these reactions never last, that the general set of society will always be anti-intellectual, and he has to prepare for it accordingly. At least as long as I’ve been teaching, I’ve been talking to students who sincerely believed that nothing of any importance happened in the world before they were born, and that the kind of literary education that would really be exiting and challenging would be the literary education that began approximately with the year of their birth. There’s nothing particularly new about that. One of the things the university stands for is to give its students some sense of historical imagination, and to convince them that a culture without a memory is senile, just as an individual without a memory is.
ARNOLD: During the 1950s, he was already a renowned critic of William Blake, but he still took time out from his busy schedule of writing and teaching to edit the Canadian Forum. At that time, the Forum was the nation’s most exciting intellectual and cultural review. As editor and critic, Frye gave encouragement to a new generation of talented writers. He recalls:
FRYE: The development of Canadian literature in the last quarter-century has tended to confirm what I was saying in my reviews of Canadian poetry between 1950 and ’60. During the ’50s I was well aware that Canadian literature was still next-year country, as it always has been. I also knew that that couldn’t last forever, that sooner or later there would be a Canadian literature with a massiveness and a weight that you couldn’t argue against.
ARNOLD: Some Canadian critics have written about a Frye school of Canadian literature, but what was his real influence?
[Eli Mandel agues that Frye had a major impact due to his criticism and commentary. Atwood denies that her style was dictated by Frye, but agrees that he was extremely important, because he was one of the few to take Canadian literature seriously.]
FRYE: What I have done is to take poetry seriously, to make it clear that I regard what happens in Canadian literature as very important to the country as a whole, and to make it clear that I believe that writers have a primary and essential social function. After that, it’s their business to write as well as they can. I’ve tried hard not to express a preference for certain types of writing as opposed to other types, and there’s no Frye school of Canadian literature—in the nature of things there can’t be. * * *
ARNOLD: Frye has devoted most of his writings to world literature, but out of his years studying Canadian writers, he began to understand his own country. His ideas about Canada appeared in his book The Bush Garden. What makes Canadians different from other peoples? What unites them?
FRYE: Canada belongs to the world, and has to take on the same technical and imaginative qualities that writers all over the world have. The fact that it’s a separate environment with its own characteristics means that that doesn’t need to become uniform, or assimilate to other cultures. Culture, in any country with a large size, is likely to be an aggregate of regional developments. These regional developments do add up to some kind of larger, more national, unity. In Great Britain, we have Hardy and Wessex, and D.H. Lawrence and Nottingham, and Hugh MacDiarmid and Dylan Thomas and Scotland and Wales, and in the United States we have Faulkner and Mississippi, and Frost and New England, but somehow or other when you add up the British writers and the American writers you do get a different body of feeling, a sensibility. My opinion is that it’s almost impossible to define this, and that whenever you venture on a definition of it, you’re into very simplistic formulas.
ARNOLD: Regional identities are strong in a country as big as Canada, but underlying our regionalism is something Frye calls “the garrison mentality.”
FRYE: Well, I used the phrase “garrison mentality” because the eighteenth-century maps of Canada consist almost entirely of forts as far as the inhabited centres are concerned. Then I noticed that Canada, and Canadian sensibility, has nothing corresponding to the American frontier, the line from north to south that keeps moving irregularly towards the west until it reaches the Pacific. The frontier gives a specific kind of imaginative conciseness to American writers, but in Canada, wherever you are, the frontier is a circumference that surrounds you, because Canada is spatially so broken up: British Columbia from the prairies by the Rockies; the big wilderness, as it has been for so long, of northern Ontario; then French Canada with a different language and traditions between Ontario and the Maritimes; the big upthrust of Maine; the separation of Newfoundland, that kind of thing.
ARNOLD: Of course, not everybody agrees with him.
[Robin Matthews claims that Frye is not really familiar with Canadian literature, and harms the study of it with oversimplified theories. He argues that the “garrison mentality” is not really present in Canadian literature. Vincent Tovell claims that the theory of “garrison mentality” is incontrovertibly true. Arnold asks if the strength of regionalism means that there is no Canadian national identity. Atwood suggests that regionalism and nationalism are different ways of looking at the same thing.]
ARNOLD: Frye agrees that there are themes common to all his countrymen.
FRYE: I’m pretty sure that there is something that connects, on a very deep level of consciousness, Canadian writers with one another, including the English and the French writers. The fact that Canada is rather sparsely populated; the feeling of moving over immense distances; the feeling of being in a northern latitude, which suggests a kind of moral indifference in nature (of course that belongs largely to the nineteenth century, but I think the legacy is still here); the sense of, for example, colour as something that goes in cycles—it comes in the summer, and goes into black and white in the winter—that kind of environmental influence; the feeling of being in a small country that does not make the history that it is participating in but is an observant country; all these make for a fundamental difference, I think, between Canadian and American consciousness, whether they’re writers or not.
ARNOLD: Observers? Is the Canadian temperament detached and uncommitted? Is it an ironic one?
FRYE: I think that this observational role does make for irony—that’s the usual form in which detached observation records itself in literature. I think there is an ironic and an almost negative tone that avoids too clear-cut a resolution. That was the thing I think that fascinated Margaret Atwood in Survival. She was not saying that Canadians are a race of losers, or that they write that way, but rather that Canadians tend to distrust the slap-bang happy-home ending.
[Atwood confirms this, and adds that she meant that “there are other ways to go” than failure.]
ARNOLD: He often uses the word “mythology” in his writings on European literature, but isn’t there also mythology that’s specifically Canadian?
FRYE: Canadian history begins too late to have anything like a true mythology, and what we have is sometimes a recreation, the way that Isabella Crawford recreates Indian mythology. You have Douglas LePan writing a poem called A Country without a Mythology, and you have Earl Birney saying that Canadians are haunted by their lack of ghosts.2 I think in a sense both of these things are true, and yet the absence of mythology in itself creates a kind of mythology in reverse—a mythology of an alien nature, and of a civilization that relates rather distantly to it. There is nothing really more ghostly than an absence of ghosts. You notice in Europe that you’re always in a place that has been lived in for many centuries, and that contributes some kind of inexplicable quality to the landscape.
[Mandel says that the “cultural problem” in Canadian literature is “the Romantic problem”—which is “the fall as described in Blake’s poetry.”]
FRYE: I think that Canada has always been Romantic. It started out in French Canada in the seventeenth century with the Baroque expansive-ness—the Jesuit missionaries, and the voyageurs, and so forth. Canada missed the rational eighteenth century that gave Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to the American consciousness, and the Constitution of course. It didn’t spend the eighteenth century exercising its reason, it spent the eighteenth century battering down the forts of the British and the French, whichever they were, and so it went directly from seventeenth-century expansionism to nineteenth-century Romantic expansionism, which had its origin in Great Britain, for the most part, and took the form of fanning out over the country, through waterways and the railways and the like. We inherit that expansionist tendency. I think that Romanticism is so much a part of our ancestry that we’re bound to resemble our parentage to some degree.
ARNOLD: His interest in Romanticism has contributed to his understanding of Canada, but what did he learn from Blake’s poetry itself? In part 2, we’ll consider Frye’s early work, we’ll look at his development from Blake critic to commentator on the Bible, and Frye will talk about the connection between literature and society.
II
FRYE: I don’t think there’s been any diminution of the excitement with which I first discovered writers such as Blake or Shakespeare or Milton. They are like old friends—they are familiar, but every time you meet them, there is something new.
ARNOLD: In 1947, Frye published his first major work, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Why was he interested in the strange and misunderstood vision of this Romantic poet?
FRYE: I think the reason for my fascination with Blake, and later my very strong and deep interest in Milton, was that I had been brought up in that kind of culture, that rather nonconformist middle-class Protestant cultural orbit. There was a great deal in it that I emotionally and instinctively rejected, but Blake made imaginative sense of it.
ARNOLD: Did Blake teach him anything new?
FRYE: Everything I know I’ve learned from Blake in one sense or another. Blake really introduced me to the conception of poetry as having its own peculiar language. Everybody said, of course, that Blake had a private symbolism, and what I discovered in working on Blake was that there’s no such thing as a private symbolism, except something profoundly neurotic; that is, there may be private allusions that you have to know a man’s life to understand, but Blake was obviously constructing something very much more objective than that, even though there were private allusions. So that by working on Blake, and trying to figure out what he meant by Orc and Urizen and Vala and so on, I began to get some notion of a specific kind of language that imaginative writers use.
ARNOLD: Northrop Frye’s work soon put him outside the mainstream of critical thinking in the 1940s and 1950s, especially the New Criticism.
FRYE: The New Criticism simply approached a work without any reference to its structure or its genre or its convention, and studied what Ransom called its “texture.” Well, I could see that the texture was important, but I could also see that words like “convention” and “genre” were pretty important too. I’d got that feeling partly from my interest in music, where I realized that things like fugue forms and sonata forms were something that existed apart from the individual works in which they were embodied. Music has always been primarily musical structure. So I began to look for a context for individual works within literature, not because I wasn’t interested in the individual work, but because I thought it gained a new dimension of significance, and a new kind of resonance, from being placed in the context where it belonged, where it would echo and re-echo the things that were closest to it in imaginative experience. That is, profound as, and unique as, King Lear is, it becomes still more resonant when you measure it against the background of Shakespearean tragedy, and still more so when you measure it against the background of tragedy as a whole, as a type of experience.
ARNOLD: Frye’s ideas about literature found expression in his next major work, the Anatomy of Criticism.
[Mandel outlines the central argument of the Anatomy.]
ARNOLD: Is the Anatomy really Frye’s most important work?
FRYE: Well, everybody assumes that I am the person that wrote the Anatomy, and for many other people that’s it, they know only that book. It’s a book that certainly defines more fully than any other book what I’ve been hunting for in literature, but it’s a very schematic book. I felt that it had to be, because that was the way it came, and it was schematic because that’s the way poets think. There are people now who regard it as a product of an over-toilet-trained mind, of somebody who wants to tidy everything up and put everything away in pigeonholes. Of course, I had no interest in pigeonholes. From the beginning, I was trying to establish a context for individual works of literature within a totality of literature; and my belief that literature is a total imaginative structure, and not just the aggregate of things that have got written, has remained unchanged.
ARNOLD: In particular, he objects to the value judgment, the shopper’s guide found in most kinds of literary criticism.
FRYE: I think that genuine value judgments are always assumptions; that is, they are working assumptions, heuristic assumptions, and they are consequently subject to later scholarship, which means that scholarship always has the power of veto over value judgments. Any keen student of literature is going to be enraptured by some writer in his teens, who will strike him as immature later on. That’s a quite normal process. I think of the value judgment as something you assume to go on with. I assume that Shakespeare is an important dramatist if I’m going to write about him or teach him. I find, in practice, that value judgment confirmed. The point is that the value judgment never becomes the basis of any scholarly work whatever; it remains in its own area of value. And a teacher should not fight the student’s preference for the television serial that he saw the night before. I think it’s better teaching tactics to indicate the similarity of devices between the two, and then the permanent values of Shakespeare will look after themselves.
ARNOLD: Frye is known as a writer on Blake, Shakespeare, and Milton, but does that mean that he doesn’t enjoy a good read in sci-fi or whodunits?
FRYE: I read detective fiction, science fiction, popular fiction a good deal. The lectures that I gave at Harvard as Professor of Poetry [SeS] were very largely on popular fiction. I’m interested in popular writing because it preserves the same formulas that more serious literature does. If you read Tom Jones or Pride and Prejudice, you will find that the plots are surprisingly complex, and that in Emma, for example, or even in Wuthering Heights, there are mysteries that are withheld until the very last few pages. You’ve got a simplified form of that in the detective story. The thing is that you don’t often want to read the detective story a second time, certainly not until you’ve forgotten who’s done it. The structure of Tom Jones or Pride and Prejudice is not really all that different, but you find that you can read them many times without any diminution of interest.
ARNOLD: His theories have fundamentally altered the way many critics see literature. One of the terms he uses is the “archetype”—that is to say, the repeating image of literature. Frye’s theories are complex, and he has many admirers and imitators.
FRYE: A student of mine once referred to “archetype spotting”; for instance, you read about somebody looking in a mirror and you automatically say, “Narcissus.” That is, of course, a technique which tends to substitute for the actual experience of literature. I don’t think the people that do that are going to get very far on their own, but it’s not my business to tell them so.
ARNOLD: Frye has always believed that the Bible is the basis of all Western literature.
[Harron discusses the influence of Frye’s theories about the Bible on his book Old Charlie Farquharson’s Testament.]
ARNOLD: A lifetime interest in the Bible culminated for Frye in 1982, with the appearance of his book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Even the title of this book found its inspiration in Blake.
FRYE: Blake’s remark about the Bible was that the Old and the New Testaments are the great code of art [E274]; that is, not that the Bible is a work of art itself—that’s nonsense—but that it supplies any number of suggestions for the kind of mythological and metaphorical thinking that poets use. While, as I see it, the Bible itself does not provide you with a mythological universe, any culture which accepts the Bible as a sacred book can find any number of leads and suggestions in it. As a matter of fact, the development from primitive Christianity through the Middle Ages down to just about the end of the seventeenth century had done just that.
ARNOLD: But if the Bible is myth, and if it is written in the language of literature, how can it be historically true?
FRYE: In every literary structure, you get the structure of words itself, which is the primary thing, and then you get a number of signposts pointing in the direction of history or doctrine or something else. When I came to the Bible, I found that while you couldn’t say that the Bible was a work of literature, nevertheless it was written in the imaginative language of literature, and consequently what was important was the story it told. That to me was what the Bible literally meant, was just what it said as a book. But the people who say that the Bible is literally true often mean that it points to something outside itself, and that it’s the truth of that something outside itself that’s important, and that is the criterion of truth. I don’t believe that. I don’t think that the events in the Bible can be pursued into history: they are what scholars call “language events,” they’re what the Bible has incorporated, and that to me is the primary thing to look at. One of the things that Biblical scholars do know is that the whole question of authorship is extremely suspect. Nobody regards Moses as the author of the first five books, nobody thinks of the Book of Isaiah as a book written by Isaiah, and the Gospels, as we now know, are later than the letters of Paul, and were not written by the twelve disciples of Jesus. That doesn’t affect the actual text of the Bible, it just affects certain historical legends about them. The Bible, when it deals with historical material, is primarily interested in certain patterns that emerge. In the Book of Judges, for example, you get a series of heroes who redeem Israel. They’re different people, and they are different stories, but they tend to run together in your mind after you finish the book, simply because the Bible is interested primarily in what I would call the myth, that is, the shape of the story rather than in the historical achievements of Gideon or Samson or Jephthah.
ARNOLD: The Bible even stands outside history.
FRYE: Ordinary history is a story of the bloodiest possible stupidity and cruelty; that I think is what Byron meant when he said that history was the Devil’s scripture.3 The record of human history is so unutterably foul and never shows you a successful bid for freedom or dignity that isn’t instantly smothered by a new kind of tyranny. So the fact that you really have no vision of salvation in history whatsoever is why you get in the Bible a story which is put over against human history, but also shows you something of the cruelty and folly of that history. The story of the Crucifixion is there to indicate that human history as we know it still does have a point, in relation to something which is not itself.
ARNOLD: And the Passover story, too, is a tale of revolution and human hope.
FRYE: The Bible is, among other things, the story of Israel, and the story of Israel begins with Israel in Egypt, about to walk out of Egypt. The Book of Exodus begins with God telling Moses that he is going to enter history, he’s going to give himself a name, he’s going to take an extremely partisan role in history, and that he’s going to be on the side of the walkers out, and not on the side of the Egyptian establishment. And that seems to me to give a revolutionary quality to the Bible which recurs in Christianity. It recurs in a different form in Islam, and such a movement as the Reformation is really a re-emphasis on the revolutionary quality of the Biblical revelation.
ARNOLD: But does the Bible really still affect the way we see the world today?
FRYE: I think that all of our philosophical and scientific structures in Western civilization come out of a matrix which is mythological, and which draws its main source from the Bible. The notion of there being a beginning and an end to time, for example, is something that we get from our Biblical heritage. The condemning of idolatry, which is really a resistance to getting wrapped up into the cycle of seasons, of a cyclical fatalism, is Biblical in its origin as well.
ARNOLD: And Frye talks about the Bible in relationship to philosophy and science in modern life.
FRYE: We got, in the eighteenth century, the beginning of the waning of the big structures of authority, both spiritual and secular. You get things like the American Revolution and the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, and that began to bring with it a sense of a possible progress within human history itself. Then, in the nineteenth century, the conception of evolution entered biology, and many people seized on that as affording a scientific proof of progress in history. I don’t think it does—I think the biological conception of evolution and the historical conception of progress are quite different things—but nevertheless many people associated the two. There is still a very widespread feeling that evolution is finished except for us. Nature may have different ideas, and may actually tend to view the human race as an intolerable parasite and throw it away and start on something else.
ARNOLD: But if religious authority has waned, the Bible still has the power to inspire and excite.
FRYE: I’ve been really quite astonished at the extent to which my book has sold. It may have something to do with my having spent my life in Canada and reached my seventieth birthday, but I am very grateful that it has become something of a bestseller, at least in this country. I think that it does indicate that people are passionately interested in what the Bible can still say, and I’ve been aware of that for some time.
[Tovell discusses the importance of religion in the modern world. Arnold asks if Frye has become politically conservative. Matthews argues that he has, and criticizes Frye’s work on political grounds. Mandel considers Frye’s later work to be “austere, remote, rigid.”]
ARNOLD: The events he has seen in his lifetime may make Frye sceptical about certain kinds of ideology.
FRYE: Whenever views of life that attempt to establish themselves on history begin to promise us a goal in the future, we’re really travelling along with a donkey’s carrot in front of us. So we are urged by interested parties, for example, to make all kinds of sacrifices because our great-greatgrandchildren are bound to be so grateful to us, they will be living in so much better a world. And it seems to me that the century which has seen what the twentieth century has cannot afford to believe in donkey’s carrots any more, and can only really turn to something that confronts them in the present moment. If that improves the future so much the better.
ARNOLD: Whatever the future is to be, literature will still have a place.
FRYE: The book happens to be the most efficient technological instrument that the human mind has ever devised, and consequently it will always be here, at the centre of our technology, no matter what else we do. There has to be a large siphoning process to take care of the people who don’t want to read, and television does that. People who don’t want to read can always stare at television, or they can go down the street with headphones on, living in a different world from the ones they see around them.
ARNOLD: But in Frye, there still burns a strong sense of idealism. He keeps deep down a hope, a hope he says we all keep, that some day man may still get back to the garden.
FRYE: When I was teaching at Berkeley in the spring term of 1969, the People’s Park business blew up, and suddenly all the archetypes of the garden of Eden story began pouring out of the student paper, and out of the student demonstrations. So I realized that these archetypes that I’ve been writing about were in fact determinates of one’s life in society. The thing that keeps us going is really a vision of what the world could be. I can’t imagine a social worker, for example, devoting herself to such a profession unless she had in her mind, at some level of consciousness, a vision of a better society than the one she’s actually engaged with day after day. And similarly with any profession, with teaching or medicine or with anything that has a social function at all, it rests, somewhere or other in the consciousness, on some kind of social vision which is cleaner and purer and tidier than the actual world you’re living in. Without that vision I think you would regard life as a form of penal servitude.
ARNOLD: And that’s what Blake meant in his poem Jerusalem, sung here by Paul Robeson.
[A recording of Robeson is played.]